I am an African American woman, an ordained Baptist minister, an educator and a registered Maine voter, and I plan to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris for president of the United States. We Baptists believe in freedom of religion, and Vice President Harris, a Baptist, has an exciting set of life credentials that emphasize her commitment to religious freedom and that connect her to the humanity-serving threads shared by the world’s religions.
My vote for Vice President Harris is not simply a matter of shared religious and racial/ethnic identity. I want her to be my president because her policies represent the most important biblical standards I apply to political candidates: Matthew 25:31-46 and Luke 10:25-37.
The Matthew passage describes a discourse where Jesus emphasizes the absolute importance of feeding the hungry, providing water for the thirsty, embracing the stranger, clothing the naked (and by implication, housing the homeless) and visiting the imprisoned – those whom Jesus identified as “the least of these.”
The passage in Luke refers to the story classically labeled “the Good Samaritan,” where Jesus and a biblical scholar, in a public conversation, identify the most important “commandments”: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and [love] thy neighbor as thyself.”
The conversation then turns to the question “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ response by way of the story of “the Good Samaritan” points out that our charge to show mercy is not limited by history, political position or ethnicity. The Samaritan was a hated outsider and stranger in that story. He was also the one who showed mercy, and, therefore, the neighbor. In telling that story, Jesus calls to us and charges us to transcend the boundaries and walls that divide us in order to be merciful and to love.
Our call to be merciful humans is a transcendent call. My fellow Baptist, Vice President Kamala Harris, has made it clear that she believes we should answer that transcendent call to be merciful humans. In a 2019 forum organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, then-Sen. Harris made it clear that the transcendent call of “the Good Samaritan” was a guiding light to her approach to public policies. She said, “Neighbor is not about having the same ZIP code. … What we learn about in that parable is that neighbor is about someone you are walking by on the street. … Neighbor is about understanding and living in service of others – that we are all each other’s brothers and sisters.”
In response to a question from someone who was formerly homeless, then-Sen. Harris talked about access to affordable housing and rent relief. Since then she has made affordable housing a plank in her platform. Feeding the hungry, preventing the shaming of the poor in public schools, housing the homeless, extending the boundaries of human inclusion, approaching criminal justice in ways that promote community healing, and so much more are ideas and policies embedded in the Harris-Walz platform.
Baptists in America highlight a curious form of political and cultural pluralism. There are many different kinds of Baptists in America. At a prayer conference in Ohio in the early 1980s, I experienced a brief immersion in this Baptist diversity. In addition to the American Baptists and the Southern Baptists, there were several kinds of “National” (Black) Baptists with my own affiliations being among the Progressive National Baptists and the American Baptists.
In addition to meeting Baptists of diverse ethnicities and nationalities, I met and prayed with conservative Baptists, general Baptists, and, yes, even Seventh-day Baptists. A substantial portion of American religious history connects to contentious issues such as slavery, abolition, segregation, integration, civil rights, women’s leadership roles and immigration. Churches have organized and reorganized around these issues, with Baptists being among some of the most “fractious,” to borrow a term from W.E.B. Du Bois.
Whole denominations have split and reorganized around these issues. Among Baptists, the splits and divisions have been both denominational and congregational. To be a Baptist is to be a Christian that knows how to agree to disagree. Sometimes we just simply disagree and go our separate ways until a disagreeing congregation calls a new pastor, or we meet again in the next generation, or we live again on the other side of Jordan.
Baptists also know how to form multiple alignments across their disagreements and differences, thus producing churches, especially Black churches, that are “dually aligned” and sometimes multiply aligned. These organizational dynamics are a part of a larger shared history of belief in religious freedom.
Many of us who are Baptist believe we have been called by Jesus Christ to witness to justice and wholeness in a broken society. Both Vice President Harris and myself are connected to Baptist traditions that have fostered African American religious leadership and advanced the causes of civil rights and equality. Her church, the historic Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, has a prominent history of civil rights advocacy, social justice activism and real-world social service, as well as both interfaith and ecumenical connections.
Vice President Harris was born to have a diverse religious autobiography: Her Indian mother was Hindu, and her Jamaican father was Christian. Very much integrated into the African American community, Vice President Harris writes that she and her sister, Maya, were piled into the back of Mrs. Shelton’s station wagon to attend a Sunday school, where her “earliest memories of the teachings of the Bible were of a loving God, a God who asks us to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves’ and to ‘defend the rights of the poor and needy.’”
Her interfaith marriage and her work with President Biden, a Catholic whose faith boldly informs his service, gives me confidence that her commitments to service and freedom will place our entire nation on higher ground.
